We may think of black holes as a one-way pit from which nothing escapes - but the movement isn't all in one direction.

When gas falls towards a black hole, some of it can come out as energy beams which scientists refer to as jets of radio emission.

Now, researchers in South Africa have discovered a bizarre phenomenon in which a group of supermassive black holes all seemed to spin out their radio jets in the same direction.

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Researchers recently discovered several supermassive black holes with radio jets all pointing in the same direction. The white circles in the image on the left point out the black holes spewing radio jets in alignment

The study shows how black holes can be aligned with each other over distances stretching billions of light-years

It was made possible by a three-year deep radio imaging survey of the radio waves coming from a region called ELAIS-N1 using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).

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The jets are produced by the supermassive black holes at the centres of these galaxies.

The only way for this alignment to exist is if supermassive black holes are all spinning in the same direction, says Professor Andrew Russ Taylor, joint University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape Chair.

The only way for this alignment to exist is if supermassive black holes are all spinning in the same direction, says Professor Andrew Russ Taylor, from the University of Cape Town

'Since these black holes don't know about each other, or have any way of exchanging information or influencing each other directly over such vast scales, this spin alignment must have occurred during the formation of the galaxies in the early universe,' he notes.

LARGEST BLACK HOLE EVER SEEN IS 200 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY

Supermassive black holes patrolling our local region of space may be more common than previously thought after astronomers made a surprise discovery.

A new object with the mass of 17 billion suns has been found in a sparsely-populated area of the local universe, just 200 million light-years from Earth.

This makes it one of the most massive black holes ever discovered, and it's in a region of space thought to be mostly empty.

The black hole, nicknamed the Beast of NGC 1600, is in a 'galactic desert', according to Professor Chung-Pei Ma from the University of Berkeley, California.

Reporting the discovery in the journal Nature, she explained the unexpected discovery of such a large black hole in a sparse region means these monsters may be much more common than previously thought.

This implies that there is a coherent spin in the structure of this volume of space that was formed during the creation of the large-scale structure of the universe.

The finding wasn't planned for: the initial investigation was to explore the faintest radio sources in the universe, using the best available telescopes.

So what could these large-scale environmental influences during galaxy formation or evolution have been?

There are several options: cosmic magnetic fields; fields associated with exotic particles (axions); and cosmic strings are only some of the possible candidates that could create an alignment in galaxies even on scales larger than galaxy clusters.

UWC Professor Romeel Dave, SARChI Chair in Cosmology said: 'This is not obviously expected based on our current understanding of cosmology. It's a bizarre finding.'

A large-scale spin distribution has never been predicted by theories.

An unknown phenomenon like this presents a challenge that theories about the origins of the universe need to account for, and an opportunity to find out more about the way the cosmos works.

'We're beginning to understand how the large-scale structure of the universe came about, starting from the Big Bang and growing as a result of disturbances in the early universe, to what we have today,' says Professor Taylor.